Ubisoft panel discloses dedication to quality games
Anyone who’s been playing Ubisoft’s big-name releases lately can testify that the company seems to be dedicated to 
putting out titles with a high degree of quality. Over the past few months, games like Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., and Far Cry 2 have all received glowing reviews.
Four of Ubi’s stars explained at a short panel GDC panel discussion, that the creation of their emotionally-involving games is largely due to the fact that they want their games to have the same production values as Hollywood films.
Mallet, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal explained that technology has actually reached the point in games that players often invest themselves emotionally in the adventures they’re playing through. A Film Director had written scripts twelve to fourteen years ago and had to wait for technology to reach the point where it could create a visual style capable of communicating the subtle messages he wanted.
The biggest challenge with real-time strategy games is the challenge of immersion.
According to de Platers, the challenge was overcome in large part by the game’s voice-recognition system, which allowed players to have limited conversations with their troops as they moved them around the maps. Even though these vocal experiences were limited in length, they helped bond the player to the characters in the game.
He explained that, in films, the audience is forced to follow the toils of a select few characters, which doesn’t let them become emotionally-detached; in order to create a similar bond between EndWar’s characters and its players, the development team had to work at creating a way to get gamers to look at their armies as collections of individuals instead of bland units.
Hocking warned that if developers just sought to emulate the techniques of movies, they would eventually be unable to progress any further.
Finally, Prince of Persia producer, Ben Mattes voiced his belief that in order to approach the cinematic-level of storytelling and audience investment, small events and moments can be more important than the biggest events in a game’s story.
Mallet hinted at Ubisoft’s desire to bring some of their games to the big screen.
